Bad Men (4 page)

"
Please" – it was Rodge – "for May. Louis was her dog."

Pearce looked at the fat fingers on his arm. He stared at them until they moved away. He said, "What makes you think I won't end up in your boot like poor Louis?"

"
Maybe you will," Baxter said. "Wallace wouldn't think twice about killing you if he had to. And he's more than capable of doing it."

For fuck's sake. You'd have thought the ugly bastard could have tried a bit of flattery. Did he want Pearce to accept this job or not? "If that's what you think, why do you want to hire me?"

"
We can't afford anyone else."

Nice.

The smell was really get
ting to Pearce now. Dead dog and cigarette smoke. It had soaked into his skin. He wanted to scrub his cheeks till they shone. He opened his window. It made only a little difference, letting in the rumble of traffic and children's shouts and a trace of barbecue smoke which momentarily masked the other smells in the car. He looked to see if he could spot anyone having a barbecue. But whoever it was, they were further up the beach, out of sight.

Baxter picked at a fingernail.
"Mr Pearce," he said, "my daughter's husband is one nasty piece of work. You've seen what he did to my dog. We've told you what he did to us. You can see the evidence for yourself." He indicated his nose. "And he's already hit my pregnant daughter."

"
Wallace has a rep," Flash told him. "A serious rep. Ask around."

Pearce looked away. Silence in the car for a while. He listened to the distant crash of waves, the beep of a reversing bus in the station away to his left. He stared out to sea. Gulls swooped for morsels at the water's edge. He had the strange feeling of timelessness. Like this could have been a hundred years ago. Then he heard the drone of a plane passing overhead. Shattered the illusion.

Just as well. He was turning into a bit of a fanny for a minute there.

"He hit May.
He beat us up. He killed the dog. There's a progression there. That's worrying, man." A muscle twitched in Rodge's cheek. "He's going to kill somebody."

"
You can't judge what he's going to do next on the basis of what he did to the dog," Pearce said. "Taking a human life is very different from killing a dog. Believe me. Fuck, you don't even know for definite it was
him
who killed the dog."

Baxter said, "Who else would have done such a thing?"

"
Okay," Pearce said. "But why would he do this?"

Flash said, "He's a sadistic fuck, has a history of violence. Forget what he did to us. That was nothing. When he was eighteen, Wallace kidnapped a guy off the street, complete stranger, flung him in his car, held him in his bedroom for a couple of days while he carved pretty patterns on his face, then sent him packing with a couple of his own severed fingers shoved up his arsehole."

"
Original. He do time?"

"
Got away with it."

"
Guy was too scared, right?"

"
Nope. Some kind of problem with the evidence being inadmissible. Everybody knew he'd done it, but he couldn't be tried for it."

"
And why did he do it?"

"
He's crazy," Flash said.

"
Got a lot of company," Pearce said. "Okay, he's crazy. How do you think he really feels about May?"

"
She's his wife. But the baby's not his. And he can't live with that idea."

"
So why doesn't he wash his hands of her?" Pearce asked.

"
He doesn't want her," Baxter said. "But he doesn't want anybody else to have her either. And he doesn't want her to have the baby."

Pearce didn't doubt the truth of Baxter's statement for a minute. Wallace sounded like he'd wound these poor sad crazy bastards up pretty tight.

"
You want the job?" Baxter asked.

"
I'll think about it," Pearce told him. The words were out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying. He really didn't want to think about it. The whole thing was pathetic. The crazy old fool and his slightly less crazy sons, the dead dog – and the smell wasn't getting any better – the teenage daughter, the unborn child, the vengeful dad. Family from hell. Did he want to get mixed up in that? He wasn't a social worker. Ah, shit, there wasn't a chance in a million anything seriously bad would happen. Just paranoia and craziness. "But don't get your hopes up," he said.

Pearce watched them drive away, Baxter at the wheel, Rodge riding shotgun, Flash stretched out on the back seat and Louis the dog decomposing in the boot.

Back at his
flat, Pearce found Hilda curled up in his basket. Yeah,
the dog was called Hilda. He liked the idea of naming it after someone, a real person, and who better than his mother? True, the dog was male. But Pearce didn't think Hilda would mind. Either of them.

He told the dog that everything was fine now, the nasty men were gone. Hilda wagged his tail, hopped towards the door and stared at it.

Pearce shook his head. In Hilda's world, anything he didn't understand meant walkies. Fair enough. Pearce grabbed Hilda's lead off the cabinet in the hallway, fastened it. He could use some clean air after the stink in the Baxter's car. Live by the sea, you ought to take advantage of it as much as possible.

Hilda pulled all the way down the road towards the promenade. When they got there, Pearce unfastened his lead and Hilda skipped off into a patch of long grass at the edge of the beach where the local dogs were fond of relieving themselves. He hunted for the perfect spot before lifting his back leg. Never ceased to amaze Pearce how the wee bastard could piss on two legs without falling over.

From their very first walk along the beach, Hilda had proved himself to be a sniffer. Not too interested in chasing sticks. Which was fine. Poor bastard only had three legs, after all. In any case, Pearce would rather sniff than chase sticks, too.

Pearce headed east along the promenade, towards Joppa. Hilda would follow in his own time.

Okay. The Baxter family. Well, they were serious. There was no doubt they were scared of Wallace, genuinely believing him capable of hurting his wife badly enough to endanger her and, particularly, her unborn child.

But were they crazy fuckers, or did they have genuine reason to be worried?

Well, you'd have to be deranged beyond measure to harm your own family. That was something some other fuckbastard did. Wasn't Wallace's family, though. The kid wasn't his, but May was his wife. … Ah, fuck. Shouldn't have started thinking about what people could do to your family.

Pearce leaned against the outside wall of an amusement arcade, breathing fast and shallow, the back of his neck cold with sweat. Memories leaked out of his head and burned acid paths down his throat and into his lungs. Holding his mum in his arms while blood pumped out of a stab wound in her neck – yeah, takes a lot of getting over. Maybe he'd never get over it. That was a possibility he'd have to face.

No point dwelling on it, though. He couldn't change what had happened. He pushed himself off the wall, carried on walking.

Just supposing for a moment that May was in danger.

Well, look at him. He wasn
't in a position to protect anybody.

At least he was breathing normally again.

He looked behind him, checked that Hilda was still there. He was half-heartedly chasing another dog. Knew that with only three legs he'd never have a chance in hell, but it was fun trying.

The guilt was a killer. Not only did Pearce fail to save his mum, but he'd sold her flat. That really fucked him up and there wasn't anything he could do about it. The flat held too many reminders of her. You know, it was
hers
. Didn't feel he could buy new furniture, put up new pictures, strip the wallpaper. Any change he made was being disrespectful to her memory. Nothing he could do about it. It would never be his.

So he'd sold it. And maybe she'd haunt him forever as a result, but he thought she'd understand. She wouldn't haunt him. Christ, no, what was he saying? That was almost as mad a notion as the Baxter family's tale. Worse, even. At least Wallace was alive. But Pearce saw Mum all the time. Just glimpses. And sometimes he heard her speak. She'd ask how he was and he'd say he was fine. They'd talk about the weather. Banal snippets of dialogue. For a while, he did wonder about his sanity. And then he thought, fuck it. He was as sane as the next man. It was normal to miss your mother.

He'd bulldozed into action. Didn't bother to redecorate, put Mum's flat on the market as it was. Not surprisingly, he didn't get the best price for it, but what he did get was substantially more than he'd expected. Property prices were outrageous.

He went looking for a flat of his own. Something he'd never had. Had his own cell at Barlinnie, mind you. Only for two weeks, though, until that Irish guy, Seamus, moved in. Read all the time, like Pearce. But they didn't get on. Pearce resented him for ending his solitude. Not Seamus's fault. Anyway, having your own cell in Barlinnie didn't really count as having your own place.

Pearce wanted to stay in the east of the city. It was his old stomping ground and he preferred to live somewhere familiar. Anywhere else, he might as well move to England or America or Australia. He'd been checking the property pages for a couple of months, noticed that despite the generally ridiculous prices of flats in the capital, Portobello seemed just that bit cheaper than more central areas. Like Musselburgh used to be before everybody cottoned on to the fact. And Porty was okay. Bit of history, which didn't hurt. He hadn't got round to buying a car yet. Probably wouldn't. There was nowhere to park it. And he hadn't driven much recently. In fact, he hadn't driven much ever. Didn't own a car when he went inside, and, not surprisingly, didn't get much practice while he was locked up. Truth was, he wasn't entirely sure of himself behind a wheel. Fortunately, Portobello was a half-hour bus ride from town. And the number twenty-six ran every five minutes. No need for a car.

Portobello was Edinburgh
's seaside (so claimed a road sign on the approach from either end of town) and once upon a time, before the dawn of the package holiday, people flocked to Portobello from all over Scotland to sun themselves and dip their toes in the sea. Must have been a sight. Like Southern California, but colder. And without the surfing. Or the bronzed babes. Used to have an outdoor swimming pool with a wave machine, so he'd heard from his neighbour, Mrs Hogg. It was highly popular, too.

These days, the vestiges of the old seaside resort remained. The amusements, fish and chip shop, ice-cream vendors. But most of the time it was a forlorn-looking place. Apart from the weekends. The weekends brought out the crowds. Pasty-skinned dads, pregnant mums with purple-veined white legs, screaming kids. Kids loved it. Sand and kids. When did that combination ever fail? Sitting on the beach building sandcastles and eating gritty ice cream as the haar rolled in.

Rest of the time, the beach was just for dog-walkers.

Pearce loved Portobello
's faded glory. His kind of place. Made him nostalgic. Could you be nostalgic for something you'd never experienced? Yeah, fucking right you could.

And you know what? Mum would have loved living here.

He'd picked up a rare fixed-price property at the east end of town. A top-floor flat. Two bedrooms. One for him. The other, well, for the dog he'd promised himself he'd get once he'd moved in. Mainly for companionship. Not that he got lonely, as such, but he was aware that talking to his mother was a bit strange and having someone else to talk to might help. Of course, some people thought it was odd talking to a dog. Pearce didn't think there was anything wrong with that at all. So long as the dog wasn't dead.

He'd been amazed
at how much haar there was round these parts. Atmospheric stuff. Out of his bedroom window, only a couple of days after he'd moved in, he'd watched it approach across the Forth from Fife. First it obliterated the little island with the lighthouse, then headed towards the coastline, rolled over the beach, and gradually consumed the bus station at the rear of his flat.